William Blake once said, “What is now proved was once only imagined.” Java has been the platform of choice for millions of developers over the past 25 years to take what’s imagined and make it real.

In his new book, “Ask Your Developer: How to harness the power of software development to win the 21st century”, author Jeff Lawson shares an analogy about the ongoing pressure of businesses to stay ahead of their competitors with innovation. He writes, “In Ford v. Ferrari, the film about Ford’s quest to win the 24 Hours of Le Mans race, there’s a great scene where Ford has finally managed to defeat Ferrari at Le Mans with an astonishing racer called the GT40. “She’s a hell of a machine,” Ken Miles, the driver, tells Carroll Shelby, the designer. But instead of basking in the glory, Miles and Shelby immediately start talking about ways to make the GT40 faster…Everyone feels the pressure to go faster, do more work in less time with fewer people, keep from falling behind.”

“Business transformation” and “digital transformation” seem to have become today’s lingua franca and the mechanisms by which companies look to stay ahead of their competitors and to more effectively meet the needs of their customers.

As Jeff and I will discuss during our upcoming fireside chat webinar April 8 (Americas) and 13 (EMEA and APAC), “The Secret Weapon of Top Performing Companies? It’s All in Who You Ask” successful business transformation requires drawing from the strength of all your assets, particularly people and technology. From the “people” perspective, top performing companies engage the developer in their business transformation strategy planning. While this seems logical, it’s not entirely common. More often, companies look to developers to implement requirements, not necessarily participate in the conversation to scope them out. Developers are the very people with the most knowledge of how application investments can be best leveraged and modernized to meet business goals. These successful companies don’t just hand the car design over to the engineers without knowing what is possible. The engineer is at the table the whole time.

From a technology perspective, applications are the work horse that will drive the car to victory. However, challenges of maintaining applications on supported and unsupported software versions, which can open you up to security and stability risk, and managing a complex application estate, can take your most creative development resources from “full throttle” to “neutral”. 

As we increasingly shift towards a digital economy, the pace of innovation and transformation continues to accelerate, driving companies to look at new ways of winning. Companies are shifting how they work, how they deliver services and how they adjust to customer preferences. Keeping your application portfolio stable and secure while having the agility to modernize with microservices and cloud-native development is crucial in the ongoing race for market share and customer mindshare. Today’s advantage becomes tomorrow’s commodity and you must have the agility to move to what’s next to stay in the race.

Oracle, with its Java SE Subscription service, which now includes the GraalVM Enterprise entitlement at no additional cost, supports its customers thru their application evolution journey. Java SE Subscription protects the investment across the entire Java application base, and GraalVM Enterprise delivers higher performance while consuming less resources. With this powerful combination, Oracle keeps our customers driving forward at the pace of their business.

Join us on April 8 (North America) or April 13 (APAC and EMEA) for an insightful dialogue on how top companies who are succeeding in business transformation are winning their race. We hope it will add an accelerant to your plans and put your strategies into high gear.